"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, Prologue–Chapter 4

When Earth is destroyed to make way for a freeway, Arthur Dent joins his friend Ford Prefect on a hilarious odyssey through space. Learn these words from the first book in Douglas Adams's popular science fiction series.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one—more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of
philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is
apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are
inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

Mr. Prosser’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was for a moment filled with
inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent’s house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back.

This friend of his had first arrived on the planet Earth some fifteen Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself into Earth society—with, it must be said, some success. For instance, he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out-of-work actor, which was
plausible enough.

It was Arthur’s accepted role to lie squelching in the mud making occasional demands to see his lawyer, his mother or a good book; it was Mr. Prosser’s accepted role to tackle Arthur with the occasional new
ploy such as the For the Public Good talk, or the March of Progress talk, the They Knocked My House Down Once You Know, Never Looked Back talk...

You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta...wrap it round your head to ward off
noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal...

You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta...wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal...

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny
subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.

The girl he had dragged along to the pub with him had grown to
loathe him dearly over the last hour, and it would probably have been a great satisfaction to her to know that in a minute and a half or so he would suddenly evaporate into a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon monoxide.

Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open
ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.

But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of
culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a marveling Galaxy, was also a great day of
culmination for Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a
fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder

Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency
fodder.

At the heart of it, unseen, lay a small gold box which carried within it the most brain-wrenching device ever
conceived, a device that made this starship unique in the history of the Galaxy, a device after which the ship had been named—the Heart of Gold.

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